Personal tools

Citing Your Sources

Citation Styles

Citation styles vary from discipline to discipline. If you're not
sure what style you should use, ask your instructor. If you are in a
lower level course and your instructor wants you to cite your sources
but does not express a preference, you may decide to choose one that's
common in the field in which you plan to study.

For the most up-to-date and authoritative answers to questions about APA, see:

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.), published by the American Psychological Association in 2010.

Service desks in Evans Library, Library Annex, West Campus Library,
Policy Sciences and Economics Library, and Medical Sciences Library each
have a copy or copies of this book (BF76.7 P83 2010). In addition,
copies can be checked out from the Evans Library and West Campus
Library.

The library also provides an APA handout in a PDF-downloadable file for your convenience.

Or you might try Dr. Abel Scribe's MLA Crib Sheet,
which contains a comparison between the 5th and 6th editions of the MLA
Handbook that's helpful if you happen to be looking at a 5th edition!

Chicago Manual of Style

The Chicago Manual of Style has its origins at the University of
Chicago where it can be traced back to a single style sheet in the
1890s, although the first edition of the manual was not published until
1906. It offers two systems of documentation:

a note-bibliography style used predominantly in history and some humanities, and

an author-date system used primarily in the sciences.

The note-bibliography system places a superscript number in the text, which points to a note, either a footnote at the bottom of the page or an endnote
at the end of the paper or chapter. An alphabetically arranged
bibliography at the end of the text or book provides a complete list of
all sources used in the work. The paper excerpt that follows
demonstrates the in-text number, which
points to a note referencing a journal article. The note could be either
an endnote or a footnote. A bibliography entry for the same text
follows:

Reflection-in-action is the process of revising and reviewing that
takes place while writing; this process was first described by Sharon
Pianko in her groundbreaking article, "Reflection: A Critical Component
of the Composing Process." According to Pianko, "The ability to reflect
on what is being written seems to be the essence of the difference of
able and not so able writers."1

Notice that in the note, the author's name is given first name first
because there is no need for alphabetizing. Notes appear at the bottom
of the page (footnote), or in a list arranged in numerical order at the
end of the text (endnote). However, since the bibliography is arranged
alphabetically, the author's name is given last name first.

In the author-date system, the author's last name and the date of
publication are provided in a parenthetical reference within the text.
The parenthetical citation directs the reader to a list of references at
the end of the text or chapter. The following excerpt from R.M.M.
Crawford's 2003 article provides an example of Chicago's in-text
documentation. The entry that would appear in the Reference list for
this selection follows:

Depriving a plant of oxygen at any time of the year is dangerous,
but plants are more likely to survive the severe conditions of flooding
and the "oxygen deprivation" that can result in summer months than in
winter (Crawford 2003).

***Notice the abbreviated journal title in the reference example; Can
J Bot stands for Canadian Journal of Botany. In many branches of
science, standard abbreviations for journals are required. Reference
works such as BIOSIS and Index Medicus can supply these, but you can
also ask at the library's reference desks.

The Chicago Manual of Style (Z253 .U69 2010), now in its
16th edition, is available near the main service desk in the Evans
Library. You can also access a library handout Libraries' website.

When you are looking at different sources of information for this
style, please remember to be mindful of the two different systems!

Turabian

The Turabian style is named for Kate Turabian, University of
Chicago's dissertation secretary from 1930 to 1958 who apparently
developed what she considered a more user friendly version of the
Chicago style for students. Over time, it has developed into a separate
style; and, while there are some differences, the two are still very
similar.

Like the Chicago style, Turabian uses two methods of documentation:

The better known method is a note-bibliography system long used in history and the humanities.

Turabian also includes a parenthetical author-date system more appropriate to the natural and social sciences.

In the note-bibliography documentation style, a
number or symbol in the text refers to a note at the foot of the page or
at the end of the text. These footnotes (or endnotes), in turn, are
keyed to entries in a separate list (a bibliography), which appears at
the end of the text and which includes all the sources used to write the
paper. Bibliographies are usually arranged alphabetically; however, in
some cases they may be arranged chronologically or by type of resource.

The basic note-bibliography system is illustrated in the following example:

Although Charles Dickens is most closely associated with London, he
felt a great affinity for Paris, as well. Peter Ackroyd writes
eloquently of the appeal that Parisian light and clarity held for the
novelist's need for brightness and order.1 A later critic,
Grahame Smith, has examined the relative positions that the two cities
occupied in Dicken's fictional universe, noting that the novelist
depicted the British capital as a shadowy labyrinth and its French
counterpart, by contrast, as a sparkling, kaleidoscopic panorama.2

In Turabian's author-date documentation system, the
name of a source's author and the date of its publication appear in
parentheses in the text. If a specific page is referred to, the page
number may also be included in the parenthetical reference. Full
publication information for the source is provided in an entry in a
separate reference list which may be titled References, Works Cited or
Literature Cited. Like bibliographies, reference lists are arranged
alphabetically by author.

The basic Author-Date method is illustrated in the following example:

In the last decade, problems paying attention have joined obesity
and aggression as ills attributed to excessive television viewing in
childhood. One researcher posits the following connection: "Fast-paced,
nonlinguistic, and visually distracting television may literally have
changed children's minds, making sustained attention to verbal input,
such as reading or listening, far less appealing than faster-paced
visual stimuli." (Healy, 1998, 32) This assertion was given powerful
support recently by a longitudinal study which included 1,278
one-year-olds. This study found that that, for every 2.91 hours of
television watched daily at age one, there was a 28 percent increased
risk of developing attentional problems by age seven. (Christakis, et
al. 2004, 710)

In the example above, the first parenthetical citation and its
corresponding entry in the Works Cited list refer to a book by a single
author. The second citation-reference list pair refers to an article by
more than three authors.

More examples of Turabian Author-Date style can be found in a library handout.

For a more in-depth treatment of both documentation methods, including examples, a copy of Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (7th ed.) is available at the Policy Sciences and Economics Library reference desk.

CSE

CSE, the style recommended by the Council of Science Editors, was developed initially for the life sciences and biomedicine, but has expanded to include mathematics and the natural sciences.

In the CSE style, a "citation" in the text points to a "reference"
listed at the end of the document. Two forms of citation are permitted
in CSE style:

1. the citation-sequence (C-S) system and

2. the name-year (N-Y) system.

In the citation-sequence system, citations in the
text are numbered consecutively in the order they are cited. These
numbers correspond to the references, which are listed at the end of the
document in the order they were cited in the text. For example:

In-text citation: Bacterial communities in the ocean may secrete substances that inhibit the growth of other species (1).

For more examples and in-depth treatment, copies of Scientific style and format : the CSE manual for authors, editors, and publishers (7th ed.) are available at in the Evans Library (T11 .S386 2006)

More examples are available in a handout provided by the TAMU Libraries.

Electronic Citations

The emergence of the Internet and the explosion of online publishing
have given rise to a whole new class of source material, making the
access of information easier for students and scholars than at any other
time in history. However, easy access is not without its costs! For
example, how do we cite all these new sources?

Web pages don't exactly fit into the same citation format as the
pages of a book, journal, or magazine. Electronic materials can appear
in online databases, on CD-ROM format, as email or listserv messages,
and in a variety of other forms. Each of these forms must be
acknowledged by name in your citations.

You will also find there are many variations among the accepted
citation styles on how to cite electronic resources. Because different
disciplines rely on different style guidelines, it isn't possible to
provide you with just a few examples of documentation types that will
illustrate all cases. In fact, even journals in the same field often
vary in their interpretations of how a particular source should be
cited, whether in print or electronically.

So what should you do then? First, check with your instructor to see
if he or she has any specific guidelines for electronic resources or a
preferred citation style or journal format for his or her discipline.
Then, check out the library's resources.
This handout includes web addresses for the major citation styles
covered in this tutorial. These websites will be the best source for the
latest updates on citing electronic material.